1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to customer support for computer programs.
2. State of the Art
Customer support is service that computer and software manufacturers (as well as third-party service companies) offer to customers. In the case of an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), customer support may include a phone number for customer to call for advice and trouble-shooting, a bulletin-board system staffed by service engineers, or a forum within an on-line service. Software updates may be downloaded that correct known bugs. Internet-based customer support, problem resolution and call tracking has been recently introduced.
Customer support may be mutually beneficial to both the customer and an ISV. Customer support enables the customer to get the most out of a software product. At the same time, customer support fosters a relationship between an ISV and a customer and provides xe2x80x9cup-salexe2x80x9d opportunities for the ISV.
In the past, however, customer support has been initiated by the customer on a hit-or-miss basis. Ironically, when things go most smoothly for the customer, indicating a job well-done on the part of the ISV, the customer is least likely to initiate a customer support relationship, and up-sale opportunities are most likely to be missed. Furthermore, customer support has traditionally been human-intensive. Getting through to a service engineer may be difficult enough in itself, but then the customer must spend a significant amount of time acquainting the service engineer with the customer""s individual needs and circumstances. A small xe2x80x9cdosexe2x80x9d of support is then given. The next occasion for interaction is likely to be much the same. No opportunity exists for broad-based, systematic, individualized customer support.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,406,269 describes a customer intelligence system in which surreptitious telephone reporting calls are made by modem from remote equipment to one or more monitoring sites. Various uses for information gathered in this manner are proposed, including determining those customers who are ready for upgrades, showing potential customers usage statistics pertaining to the installed base, etc. Communications is one-way, in the uplink direction only. Furthermore, surreptitiousness greatly restricts the manner in which the system may be used and raises many issues of privacy and intrusiveness.
The present invention, generally speaking, provides for broad-based, systematic, individualized, interactive customer software support through a two-way, voluntary automated exchange of information between a software agent installed on a customer""s machine and a server machine via a wide area computer network, e.g., the Internet. Communication between the agent and the server is optimized to be unobtrusive or transparent, using spare bandwidth of intermittent Internet connections, for example. The agent is software non-specific and may be instructed to operate with respect to any arbitrary software program, and may further be instructed at various different times to operate with respect to various different software programs, including multiple different software programs on a single machine. The agent, with the user""s informed consent, gathers activity information about the operations of the software program(s) and uploads this information to a particular server machine within a distributed server machine architecture, where it is stored in a database on a per-software-copy basis. A rules engine may cause instructions carrying a message targeted specifically toward the customer (based on the activity information) to be downloaded to the agent. Based on these instructions, the agent may take any of various actions, such as present a survey, present an advertisement, send an upgrade notice, present a limited-time offer, deliver individualized marketing messages, offer goods for sale and fulfill the commercial transaction, install an upgrade or bug fix for either an application or the agent itself, etc. Message presentation to the customer may be timed (e.g., delayed from the time of download) to achieve maximum impact. Timing may be relative to individual program menu selections. For example, a message relating to a particular product feature may be presented just after that feature has been used. The agent may be instructed to operate with additional applications, including applications shipped prior to the existence of the agent. Exemplary uses include marketing, sales, customer registration, technical support, market research, customer surveys, usage monitoring, software testing, in-product advertising, etc.